Watergate Scandal

THE WATERGATE SCANDAL Watergate is a hotel in Washington D.C. where the Democratic National Committee held their campaign headquarters. The current president at the time was Richard M. Nixon, who was involved in the scandal himself and which lead to the cause of his resignation. The Watergate scandal should not have happened, but it did and it caused the American people to judge less of their government system. The scandal began on June 17, 1972, with the arrest of five men who were caught in the offices of the Democrat's campaign headquarters. Their arrest uncovered a White House sponsored plan of espionage against the political opponents and a trail of intrigue that led to some of the highest officials in the land. The officials involved in the Watergate scandal were former U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell, White House Counsel John Dean, White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldman, White House Special Assistant on Domestic Affairs John Ehrlichman, and President Nixon. On April 30, 1973, nearly one year after a grand jury investigation of the burglary and arrest of the people involved, President Nixon accepted the resignation of Haldeman and Ehrlichman and announced the dismissal of John Dean. Furthermore, U.S. Attorney General Richard Kleindienst resigned as well shifting the position to the new attorney general, Elliot Richardson. However, Elliot Richardson decided to put Harvard Law School professor Archibald Cox in charge of conducting a full-scale investigation of the Watergate break-in. Hearings were opened in May of 1973 by the Senate Select Committee on Presidential Activities with Senator Sam Ervin of North Carolina as the chairman. Suddenly, a series of startling revelations began as Dean testified that Mitchell had ordered the break-in and that a major attempt was under way to hide White House involvement. Dean also claimed that President Nixon had authorized payments to the burglars to keep them quiet. The Nixon administration...

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...The WatergateScandal Essay written by Unknown The WatergateScandal was a series of crimes committed by the President and his staff, who were found to spied on and harassed political opponents, accepted illegal campaign contributions, and covered up their own misdeeds. On June 17, 1972, The Washington Post published a small story. In this story the reporters stated that five men had been arrested breaking into the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee. The headquarters was located in a Washington, D.C., building complex called Watergate. These burglars were carrying enough equipment to wiretap telephones and take pictures of papers. The Washington Post had two reporters who researched deep into the story. There names were Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, they discovered that one of the suspects had an address book with the name and phone number of a White House official who could have been involved in the crime. The reporters suspected that the break-in had been ordered by other White House officials. In a press conference on August in 1972, President Nixon said that nobody on the White House Staff was involved in the crime. Most of the public accepted Nixon's word and dropped the questioning. But when the burglars went to trial four months later, the story changed rapidly from a small story to a national scandal. It ended only when Richard Nixon was forced from office....

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The Lasting Effect of the WatergateScandal
When one thinks of what has been termed as the Watergatescandal many different issues can come to mind. Watergate is arguably, the largest, most widely known political scandal in American history. Watergate brought about a shift in the American public’s view of the presidency, causing many at that time to lose faith, and view the office in a way it had never been viewed before.
What has become known as Watergate is an all-encompassing term for a mixture of crimes and offenses involving over thirty U.S. Government officials ranging all the way up to the office of the president. The term was derived from a Washington, D.C. office-hotel-apartment complex named Watergate. This hotel was the scene of what was at the time referred to as a “third-rate burglary” that occurred on June 17, 1972. The burglary occurred at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee located inside the building. A security guard discovered a burglary in progress and called police. Subsequently police responded and arrested 5 men for the burglary.
Washington Post investigative reporter Bob Woodward was assigned to the story initially. On the surface there was nothing about the burglary that seemed unusual. In fact most media outlets that reported information on the break in initially described it as a minor local story of...

...Hist-H106
10 October 2012
Final Draft
WatergateScandal
The WatergateScandal had everything. For many, the first thing that comes to mind about Watergate is the Nixon administration and the political scandal that destroyed the reputation of the White House. There are several questions that come to a persons mind when they think about the WatergateScandal. For example one question commonly asked is was the Watergate necessary, and was Nixon to paranoid about others? Also a commonly asked question is did Richard Nixon have a choice in resigning from his duty as President of the United States? Watergate was the unnecessary event that led to Richard Nixon’s downfall in office. “On June 17, 1972, five men, including CIA agent James McCord were arrested in the burglary of the Democratic party headquarters in the Watergate apartment complex in Washington, D.C.” “The Post Investigates.” Later in the year, the Federal Grand Jury accused those five men for their involvement in the Watergate burglary. Then a little Less than two months later, Richard Nixon was reelected President in a landslide over George McGovern, the Democratic candidate.
Prior to the accusations, the story of the burglary caught the eye of two Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. The two learned from a security aide...

...Watergate Paper
April Overstreet
HIS/145
October 24, 2011
Jerome Reilly
Watergate Paper
“On Oct. 20, 1973, in the so-called “Saturday Night Massacre,” President Richard M. Nixon abolished the office of special Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox, and accepted the resignation of Attorney General Elliot L. Richardson and fired Deputy Attorney General William B. Ruckelshaus for their refusal to fire Mr. Cox.
The president took the action to prevent Mr. Cox from obtaining audiotapes of White House conversations implicating Mr. Nixon in the attempted cover-up of the Watergate break-in (in 1972, five Nixon campaigners were caught trying to place recording devices inside Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate complex). Solicitor General Robert Bork, the acting attorney general, followed the president’s order to fire Mr. Cox.
These actions enraged the public and many in Congress. The Oct. 21 New York Times wrote: “The president’s dramatic action edged the nation closer to the constitutional confrontation he said he was trying to avoid. Senior members of both parties in the House of Representatives were reported to seriously discuss impeaching the president.”
The president was unable to stop the Watergate investigation, however. The new special prosecutor, Leon Jaworski, continued Mr. Cox’s work and forced the president to hand over the tapes in July 1974. Although 18 minutes of...

...lWatergate Scandal Timeline
A Complicated President
There have been many scandals throughout American presidential history, but only one has ever brought down a presidency. To understand Watergate, it is helpful to have an understanding of the culture of the administration, and of the psyche of the man himself. Richard M. Nixon was a secretive man who did not tolerate criticism well, who engaged in numerous acts of duplicity, who kept lists of enemies, and who used the power of the presidency to seek petty acts of revenge on those enemies. As early as the 1968 campaign Nixon was scheming about Vietnam. Just as the Democrats were gaining in the polls following Johnson's halting of the bombing of North Vietnam and news of a possible peace deal, Nixon set out to sabotage the Paris peace negotiations by privately assuring the
South Vietnamese military rulers a better deal from him than they would get from Democratic candidate Hubert Humphrey. The South Vietnamese junta withdrew from the talks on the eve of the election, ending the peace initiative and helping Nixon to squeak out a marginal victory.
During Nixon's first term he approved a secret bombing mission in Cambodia, without even consulting or informing congress, and he fought tooth and nail to prevent the New York Times from publishing the infamous Pentagon Papers (described below). Most striking, however, was Nixon's strategy for how to deal with the enemies that he saw...

...Before the summer of 1972, the word "Watergate" meant nothing more than an office and luxurious apartment complex in Washington, D.C. As a result of a "third-rate burglary" on June 17 of that year, it came to be associated with the greatest political scandal of that century and would change the lives of the many people involved — especially President Richard M. Nixon.
While doing his rounds at the Watergate Hotel in the early morning of June 17, 1972, security guard Frank Wills found a door, located between the basement stairwell and the parking garage, that was being prevented from latching by a piece of tape. He removed the tape and continued his rounds. Returning to the same spot later, he discovered that someone had re-taped the door. His curiosity now aroused, he called the police. Around 2:30 a.m., after the police arrived, five men, wearing business suits and latex gloves, were arrested in the offices of the Democratic National Committee. The men had been repairing wiretapping equipment and, according to some, taking pictures of documentation.
The five burglars were later identified as Bernard Barker, Virgilio Gonzalez, Eugenio Martinez, Frank Sturgis, and James W. McCord Jr. Bob Woodward of the Washington Post was present at their arraignment and overheard McCord mention "CIA" in connection with his occupation. Another of the arrested men identified his occupation as "anti-communist." Intrigued, Woodward...

...name 1
President Nixon and the “WatergateScandal”
By: name
A White House political scandal came to light during the summer of the 1972 presidential campaign between Republican candidate President Richard Nixon and Democratic candidate Senator George McGovern. The scandal surfaced after a break-in at the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate apartment-office complex in Washington, D.C. After several Congressional hearings, it all ended in the resignation of President Nixon in 1974, who was in fact the first President to resign.
What were the long term effects of the Nixon Administrations “WatergateScandal” on the American Government?
It all began with Nixon’s Administration wanting to win the upcoming election on November 7, 1972. Therefore they devised an unsuccessful plan to break-in to the Democratic office on a summer night to get information on their campaign. The WatergateScandal was a two year cutthroat affair that led to many long term effects in our government.
One of the most negative effects of the Watergatescandal was skepticism about the federal government in American public opinion. The public opinion is a large part in American Government because we the people decide who represents us in the public offices; in this case the scandal caused many people to question our...

...Watergate: Analysis of a Presidential Crisis
The term “Watergate” has become a common household name in correlation with people's thoughts about corruption in government. President Nixon was in office at the time of this scandal and is often thought to be the most famous face in America's conspiracy of wickedness in the government. The Watergatescandal had rocked everything our country thought we knew about the American Presidency because it had forfeited the common vision of the leader of the nation. Watergate had replaced the image of elegance and worldliness of the U.S. President with a scattered vision of corruption and extreme competitive measures that the country had never been a part of. Richard Nixon and his men had taken unauthorized recordings of his reelection competition and other illegal activities such as accepting prohibited campaign contributions.
Richard Nixon was born in 1913 and was placed into a life of academics and politics. He attended Whittier College and Duke University Law School. He was, elected to the senate in 1950. From there General Eisenhower selected Nixon to be his Presidential running mate as the Vice President. He served many duties and many responsibilities for President Eisenhower. Later, in 1960 he ran for office against John F. Kennedy and lost by a close defeat. Then two short years later he ran for Governor of California and again was...